


Auteur Theory

by scioscribe



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Essays, F/M, Films, M/M, Metafiction, Queer Gen, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:33:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nadir’s body of work has been examined before—and in much broader and deeper contexts than this blog!—most notably in <i>24 Hours to Live</i>, the collection of essays edited by Rachel Baxter, and his own <i>What I Thought About the Movies I Made: The Abed Nadir Story</i>—but for those of you already saying tl;dr, here’s an abbreviated summation of how auteur theory lets us realize the true brilliance of Nadir’s filmmaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Auteur Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Cult filmmaking underwent a boom with the introduction and mainstreaming of web video, arguably making it too easy for aspiring filmmakers to access virtual audiences: critics complained that almost overnight, new YouTube sensations would “arrive,” only to flare out in forty-eight hours.

One of the stayers—who later transitioned successfully into more (and less) mainstream cinematic work—was Abed Nadir, whose films spoke eloquently and sometimes ludicrously of the loneliness and longing for connection of the twenty-first century raised-by-TV outcast.  Nadir’s body of work has been examined before—and in much broader and deeper contexts than this blog!—most notably in _24 Hours to Live_ , the collection of essays edited by Rachel Baxter, and his own _What I Thought About the Movies I Made: The Abed Nadir Story_ —but for those of you already saying tl;dr, here’s an abbreviated summation of how auteur theory lets us realize the true brilliance of Nadir’s filmmaking.

Nadir supposedly started his work with a collection of student-cast and student-centric short films set at Greendale Community College, where he was enrolled from 2009-2013, but most of these have been lost.  One blurry short surfaces from time to time on live-stream sites: it’s black-and-white, which Nadir would later claim to think was a “cheap attempt to evoke emotion through excessive nostalgia,” and features a young black man (not credited) turning towards the camera and smiling before he claims he didn’t know “Abed” was filming yet.  Fans have made consistent attempts to claim that this is an early attempt at surrealism, but it seems more likely that it is only an outtake.

Nadir’s earliest rumored masterpiece was a religious Kaufman-esque epic about a filmmaker’s search for God; this was legendarily destroyed at the hands of an outraged—and obviously oversensitive—campus protester.  Nadir fans are famously resentful of their missing epic, but as we’re working with the material we have, not the material we _wish_ we had, it’s best to skip through the Greendale years—the rest of which featured documentaries not preserved for history—and into Nadir’s post-college professional career.

The first major professional achievement was a series of web videos.  The first was called “Him and Her,” and featured Nadir’s most recognizable continuing characters, which are called, well, “Him” and “Her.”

(Nadir would claim in his most publicized interview to be “not very good at coming up with names,” and most of his characters would indeed remain nameless.  The fan-favorite—the “exit, pursued by a bear” of characters names—is “I Couldn’t Think of How to Name Him Without Making It Obvious,” who is the last incarnation of “Him,” in Nadir’s second-to-last work, _Where We Went After That_.)

The young man and woman of the _Him and Her_ series would appear in seventeen eleven-minute shorts, sometimes co-starring other characters like _Princess_ , _Alpha_ , and _Queen_ , but always coming back to the adventures of the two starring characters, who would travel between dimensions and possibilities.  This could be the stuff of low-budget science fantasy—this _has_ been the stuff of low-budget science fantasy, as Nadir, a fan of the original British _Inspector Spacetime_ , was acutely aware—but the longing at the center of _Him and Her_ kept it far more vibrant than its context deserved.  To begin with, the relationship between the couple always seemed tentative, as though Nadir was not fully committed to filming it, and oftentimes individual episodes would begin with them apart: “He” had a fully interactive computer simulation program called “Almost,” and “Almost” featured heavily in openings.  Viewers have consistently argued that Nadir—who would persistently refuse to attribute any mental diagnoses to himself but who did, in later years, agree to the label of “neuroatypical”—felt more strongly about the relationship between “Him” and “Almost” than he did the relationship between “Him” and “Her.”

This is part of a continuing pattern of Nadir’s cinematic attention to the nonhuman and the mechanical: later protagonists would almost always incorporate a cyborg element or an artificial—and extremely exaggerated—cyberpunk-type limb.

Nevertheless, despite the arguable marginalization of “Her,” Nadir has always had outspoken female fans—this blogger included—because of the sophistication of the desire involved in the filmmaking itself.  Nadir lets the camera linger on "Her" various incarnations—the cast for the series was continuously in flux—and seems to film her in fuller color than any other character besides “Him.”  She is continuously in motion, in contrast to the staid “Almost,” and the camera enjoys the lines of her body in a sensual but arguably desexualized way.  It’s appreciation without the faintest trace of a leer: it is, critics have argued, envy of “Her” life and joy, which is always what “He” chooses in the end.

There are no tag scenes between “Him” and “Almost.”

The appreciation of the mechanical and the arguable envy for the specifically non-mechanical—and the connection of that to the sexuality enjoyed by the couple as opposed to the wired-in-place friendship between the human and the artificial—also appears in Nadir’s first full-length film, the low-budget horror classic, _It’s Dark at Night_.

In _It’s Dark at Night_ , a group of six friends goes to a cabin.  It’s an oddly-paced horror film, in which the characters make so many stubbornly rational decisions that it is an hour and fifteen minutes into the ninety minute runtime before anyone actually dies, despite the chainsaw-wielding maniac—laid off the lumberjack crew—running amuck.  Nevertheless, it is a tremendously unsettling work, in part because of the almost icy logistics.  Although viewers debate which male figure is properly “Him,” because everyone this time around is credited with a number alone, the most popular theory is that the man constantly tweeting questions to an unseen companion—one he confidently professes is “at least three or four people, it’s a hotline!”—is almost certainly the correct figure.  His ability to connect with both the lifeless and the living is highly suggestive, after all, but there’s no way to avoid how the answers he receives both keep him alive and keep the movie from being, well, _fun_ , as Number Six points out at one point late in the film.  ( _It’s Dark at Night_ is also, like most of Nadir’s work, heavily self-referential.)

The running time is bolstered by an odd scene in which the campers watch a television program in which a flirtatious male cross-dresser is “playfully” mocked by approximately half the cast: Number One (my suggestion for “Him”) toys with his phone, as if he wants to ask a question—laughter erupts—and he puts it aside.  It is a small but carefully observed moment.  Nadir’s private life was intensely private—he was always more interested in content creation than content promotion, and in a close circle of friends rather than fan interaction—but his work is fairly canonical in queer film theory classes in part because of its disconnected sense of what blogger Jim Chu would refer to as “strange longing.”

(Not to make this post overly personal, but I remember watching that scene myself at a midnight movie night in Phoenix, sitting next to the girl I loved: I remember the exact way the light from the screen hit her wrist, the paleness of it, like moonlight.  You can debate about Nadir’s queerness all you want, but that night, I knew that he, like me, understood what it was like to sit next to someone you were desperate and terrified to touch.)

The film received enough minor commercial success for Nadir to begin doing directorial work on the cheap for studio productions—while it’s surprising that he accepted it, given his distaste for surrendering control, it makes sense given the financial climate and the melancholy cast of his personal projects at that time.  (The last _Him and Her_ aired during this time.  It was a simple two-person sketch, not featuring “Almost” at all, and consisted simply of a wedding scene filmed through a series of long-range shots, “Him” and “Her” tiny at the end of the lens.)  He directed romantic comedies-always lending them a faint bleakness that made them more likely to flop than succeed—and got assistant credits on splashy action features, eventually scripting and directing one of his own.

That film—I know, we’re heading towards tl;dr territory here ourselves—is the one that made his fans sit up and pay attention again.  _The Last One_ features a married man—named “Joe,” Nadir’s lack of talent for names having become more conventionally presented now but not, obviously, eradicated—whose wife “Beth” and best friend “Samad” (with the obligatory robotic left arm) fought giant rats with him across a post-apocalyptic landscape.  The plot is largely and almost dramatically incoherent, but it is the first _hopeful_ picture in Nadir’s repertoire, with the characters finally balancing their relationships with each other.  Everyone ends the movie bloody and bruised, but smiling, the rats appropriately subdued, and Joe slings his arms around Beth and Samad both.  The camera lingers on his smile.  Meanwhile, a flower is sprouting in the background, between cracks in the sidewalk—Nadir appears irritated by this in the commentary, stating that he “thought it was cheesy but couldn’t cut it out because—nobody wanted me to.”

The smile is hope enough for anyone, though.

Nadir went back to web-only work after this, claiming to have had all the mainstream success he could stomach, and he did a series of web films that were his first stab at a kind of quirky mechanical realism.  In these works—oddly titled _What We Learned About Happiness (Winger)_ , with the parenthetical appearing to act as a citation of sorts, though the quote is unpublished and untraceable to any known source—brightly colored balls roll together, apart, and then together again; waves crash smoothly against beaches; chopsticks twirl noodles, and televisions flicker on and off.  It is as though Nadir has finally determined what kind of life rests in what is traditionally considered “lifeless,” and has embraced it to the fullest.  Meanwhile, images of separation and union flicker throughout.

“It’s about divorce,” Nadir said in one interview.  “And it’s a love story.  Two, actually.  Maybe three.”

The second-to-last film is the aforementioned _Where We Went After That_ , and it’s a shadow play, characters seen only in silhouette.  At the end, their hands touch, and the screen fades to gray and then to black.  The outtake—already the subject of conspiracies—recurs: “Abed, I didn’t know you were filming yet.”

“I’m always filming,” Nadir says, in this elongated version.  “Well, you.  I want you to be in all my movies.”

There are at least two RPF slash stories online for Abed Nadir/Outtake Guy (alternately “I Couldn’t Think How to Name Him Without Making It Obvious”) and given Nadir’s queer following, it’s surprising there aren’t more.  _I demand more, people_ , and sure, yes, this is a serious academic blog about cinema, but I’m breaking character here.  Do it and I will blog about a movie of your choice!

The last film—we’re wrapping up, I promise—is the indie release _We Have to Write Our Own Stories_ , and it is, as Nadir marketed _Where We Went After That_ , a love story or two, about a boy who went on a quest to find the stories that were about him.  It spins like a wild carousel, going from gritty—or gritty suburban, anyway—realism of the boy running one finger down the spines of videos in outdated rental stores (you get the feeling Nadir would like for them to come back), to the fantastic (the boy steps inside the television and befriends the lead characters of his favorite show), to the same aching close observation of that moment in _It’s Dark at Night_ (“I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me, or with what I wanted, until I heard you say that maybe friendships were more special than what we’d been having”).

The whole time, the boy—and later the man—seems as fragile as glass, but when the moment comes, he is strong enough to pull someone out of the world into the television set—to pull “Troy,” a strange name choice, enough for you to wonder if he was just picking mythological names at this point, with there also being a “Penelope” and an “Achilles” in the credits, too—and kiss him.  He is strong enough, too, to then to say, “I learned how to get out,” and grapple back into the world again.  The grappling hook is the only concession to the idea that the boy/man might be more mechanical than his fellows.

It’s also _awesome_ —she says, again discarding her professional role—a metafictional love story that ends with a grappling hook?  Queer characters of color in canon?

I know I started this post trying to stay disconnected, the way analytical writing is supposed to be, but I know, also, that that’s broken down by now, and in the spirit of Abed Nadir, I say: fuck what we’re supposed to do.  We can climb in and out of the screen.  We can take our lovers with us.  The cinematic is as personal as the personal is political, and Nadir’s challenging, weird, and sometimes borderline unwatchable work—the man never could construct a decent plot, not until that last film—is all three.  It’s a challenge to see ourselves as human, sometimes, and it’s a challenge to see ourselves as deserving of love.  If any of this analysis has been valid—if the auteur theory means that Nadir’s life and beliefs shaped his films more fully than anything else—than I have to say that I hope he climbed out of the screen.  I hope he found happiness.

He gave me a lot of it, growing up.

Now I’m getting ready to rewatch _We Have to Write Our Own Stories_ in my pajamas—who’s up for a live-blog?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [oh the snow, it sparkles so](https://archiveofourown.org/works/760177) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account)
  * [[Podfic of] Auteur Theory by scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1590866) by [originally reads (originally)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/originally/pseuds/originally%20reads)
  * [The Boy Who Couldn't Breathe Underwater Film Review](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10928124) by [Missmarvel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missmarvel/pseuds/Missmarvel)




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